


drabbles for martha

by danahscott



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Drabble Collection, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-22 03:37:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11371788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/danahscott/pseuds/danahscott
Summary: what it says on the tin





	1. contagious

Martha scanned the alien laying in front of her on a makeshift hospital bed. She’d normally be unfazed by his purple pallor if it weren’t for the green complexions of all the doctors and nurses stumbling around blindly. 

“I don’t understand,” the alien doctor kept mumbling. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” Martha peered behind his neck where black ooze dripped onto the blue cloth beneath him. “This illness - this disease - it’s impossible.” Martha turned to the bewildered doctor, stern and serious.

“A good doctor doesn’t rattle on about how a disease is impossible. They treat it.” 

“And you’d know?”

“I would, actually. Doctor Martha Jones.” She paused, looking at the unconscious alien. “If I treat him, will you let my friend go?” She asked.

“You can’t treat him. Anyone who has touched a patient has contracted the illness. There’s nothing to do except let the illness die with the patients.”

“I’m immune, trust me.” She tentatively touched the alien’s neck, taking a pulse. Steady. Strong. There was still time. “I’ll help you, but you have to let the Doctor go? I mean - my friend. The one you’ve kidnapped.” The alien doctor paused for a long time, considering the offer.

Without looking away from Martha, he addressed the nurse, “go get him. And be quick about it.” 

Quickly, Martha set to work.


	2. all good things must come to an end

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> martha and her family post last of the time lords

It was a Sunday night when Martha almost called him. It was just a moment at the end of a long day at the end of long week that felt like it had gone on forever. It had only been two weeks since he’d dropped her off. It was just a lapse of judgement, that’s all, and for a moment, with her finger hovering over the call button, she almost let it ring. She could have pictured it: he’d be surprised, or quite possibly in the middle of a battle and she’d say, “What do you say, one more trip?” just like he used to say to her.

But then, with a determined sigh, she clicked off her phone, stretching out on her bed. The imprint of the TARDIS was still etched onto her mattress. She shut her eyes until the itch to run faded away. She was still plagued with nightmares. Disjointed images of death and destruction and the planet she loved turning to dust in her hands. The feeling of solitude and loneliness creeping back into her heart, the knowledge that the Doctor, the man she loved, was somewhere being tortured, maybe even dying, and she couldn’t help him until the end. 

She caught her mother staring out the window sometimes, letting the warm dish water run over her hands until they were raw and red, until Martha had to turn it off and watch her mother flinch at her own daughter’s touch. She would always go sit in her room alone for an hour after that. Sometimes Martha could hear her praying. Once, by chance, she heard her mom whisper during one of those times, “I thought I would never see it again. I thought it was gone forever.” And then she looked at Martha, so sadly. Martha didn’t know how to respond.

It was easier and harder with her dad and her brother. She’d call them and make small talk, but they just sounded different. Like there was a weight upon their hearts but they couldn’t be bothered to say it out loud. Most of all, they were scared. True, the family fights had stopped, but part of that was because they never left the house.

Tish was keeping it together, mostly. She had been acting as comfort for the whole family. It was like Martha and her were a task force with the sole mission of making sure everyone was okay. Tish threw herself into baking. She kept buying herself recipe books, each one harder than the last. One day, Martha found her sobbing on the kitchen floor, hands caked in batter, because she just couldn’t get it perfect, and now the eggshell was smashed into the dough and she couldn’t feed it to Dad, because it would kill him, and it would be all her fault. 

And the worst part for Martha was that everything was so foggy. She would start to remember a fond memory of her times with him, but within a matter of minutes, her mind always lead her back to the end, to the misery, and the sadness, and the death. She couldn’t separate it anymore, the travelling and the fighting. The lines were fatally blurred. The whole series of adventures was punctuated by that year, dooming it in her mind as an altogether painful experience, wiping away any of the good. 

And that was why she wanted to call him. To remember that it could be good again, that it could be fun. But she also knew she had to wait, because as soon as she went back to him, it would be “one more trip” until it destroyed her again. One day, she’d be able to try it again, travel with him and be reminded of the good in the universe, but it was going to take time. Martha set her phone down on the nightstand, shut her eyes and prepared for another night of restless sleep.


	3. cold december night

Martha watched her breath fog up and dissipate in the cold winter air. Just hours earlier, a spaceship almost crashed into Buckingham Palace, undoubtedly involving the Doctor. She smiled a little, hugging herself tighter to stave off the cold. 

Everyday was getting easier. Everyday,, the weight on her heart lifted just a little less. And then there was UNIT. It didn’t take long for them to find her and it didn’t take long for her to start working there. She didn’t realize just how much she’d loved the travelling and the aliens. She used to wonder if she’d only loved him and him alone and that that was why she’d stayed. Now she knew it was more than that. 

Martha shivered. She wondered where he was right now. She hoped he was safe. She hoped he was happy.


	4. i did it because i love you

She bites her tongue because she has to. She puts on the uniform because she needs to. Because what else can she do in 1913? So she endures his dismissive remarks, ignores the comments from the rich schoolboys who have never known suffering and she lives for the nighttime. 

She’d curl up in the TARDIS, letting it’s mournful hum swell around her, enveloping her like a warm blanket. I know, she says sometimes, I miss him, too. 

Most nights, she plays his video, the only times she can see his eyes light up in the way they used to. After the tenth night, she could recite it by heart. 

She scratches a new tally marks into the wood of her chambers every day, and every day she gets closer to getting him back, to leaving, to being free. Until then, she will pull through it. Go to bed every night with chafed hands from having them soaked in soapy water all day. She will watch him and Joan grow closer and closer as she is pushed farther and farther away. She will eat the leftovers from the schoolboys’ and grimace at the taste. 

She will do all these things, and she would do them over and over again, because she loves him. She loves him. What wouldn’t she do?


	5. a long way from home

Martha stood on the alien planet and felt the heat of three alien suns. The grass under her feet was sticky, different than Earth’s, and the air was humid. More humid than she was used to. It was one of those few times when the Doctor and her weren’t running or hiding and solving a mystery. She could smell the pleasant aroma of cinnamon. The Doctor said it came from the trees, but it seemed to waft up from the very earth itself. 

He stretched out in the grass, patting the ground next to him, and without hesitation, Martha took the cue to lean next to him, lying down next to him. The sky was the most vibrant shade of purple. She sighed, contentedly, turning her head to face him.

“We should do this more often, you know. It’s quite nice to relax. Tell me, Doctor, how does trouble always manage to find you?” He shook his head, giving a little laugh. 

“That’s a good question.” They sat in silence for a moment. “Do you ever want to go back? Home, I mean. Just for a visit.” Martha looked at him, alarmed. He looked away. “Rose would. She’d ask to go visit all the time.” Martha tried to ignore the mention of Rose’s name. It was too beautiful a day for the ache in her heart to bite at her. 

“Sometimes, yeah. But then there are days like these.” Before she could stop herself, she found herself asking him, too. “Do you miss your home?” He was quiet for a long time, and Martha started to think he wasn’t going to respond. 

“Every day,” he stated, simply. “Every day.”


	6. bright eyes

Martha glanced up at Neel, watching him watch her through his slitted, beige eyes. His black hair brushed against the top of his shoulders and then spread outwards like sparks from a fire. His red robes draped against the ground, he smiled up at her, thin-lipped and warm. 

“Your eyes,” he said, in the twittery voice he had. 

“What?” Martha asked him, shyly. It had been a long while since anyone had looked at her like that. And though it was most likely because he was alien and she was human, she still found herself liking it. 

“They sparkle.” She smiled.

“Oh yeah?”

“They’re brighter when you look at him,” he said, a wry smile on his face, looking over to where the Doctor was fiddling with his sonic screwdriver. Martha bit back the pang of disappointment. She hated being reminded, lately. Neel looked away, tracing circles on the table in front of him. 

“I don’t reckon he notices,” Neel said, with a slight shrug.

Martha continued looking at the Doctor. “No. No, I don’t suppose he does.”


	7. scar

She had a scar in the center of her palm. By the end of that year, she was covered with so many bumps and bruises that she’d thought nothing of it. But this one stuck with her. Every time she shook someone’s hand, every time she washed them, every time she answered her cell phone, the scar was there, glaring at her. She wished she could erase everything of that awful, miserable year. She wished she could forget, like everyone else.

Mickey traced it sometimes at night, lying in bed. He’d grab it, playing with her fingers, then running his pinky finger down the long white curve in the palm of her hand and kissing it. Sometimes, it’s beautiful. Sometimes, it’s symbolic. It’s what she went through. It’s a marking that proves that she went through hell and back and still survived. That she singlehandedly saved the world and escaped unscathed, with nothing more than a little crescent shaped scar on her hand.

And then, other times, she doesn’t want to remember. She wants to remember the feeling of warm, purple grass between her feet, the sound of a saved city singing, the exhilaration pumping through her blood every time the TARDIS materialized somewhere new. She didn’t want to remember a knife slicing through her skin, a desperate woman convinced she could help and enraged when she couldn’t. Sometimes, Martha balled her fists up tight, because she didn’t want that mark on her. She didn’t want to be reminded of that year and not the good bits. Because there were good bits. There were.

But she was okay with it. She had to be. You cannot erase a scar, you can only let it heal. And slowly, but surely, Martha was learning that no matter what scars were on her body, she could soothe the ones on her heart. And that would be enough for her to know.


	8. lie

Martha knew she was lying to herself. It had started off a passing crush for the man who had saved her life. For the man whose life she had saved. She hadn’t known him yet, but something felt like she was hurtling in his direction. And then, quickly, it became clear that nothing of that sort was going to happen. He offered her time and space, but not his hand and not his heart, and besides, it was just a crush. She could shake a crush. 

And then, she couldn’t. And then, it snowballed into this heavy weight pressing down on her chest, constricting her breathing. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t seen it happen. If she could have just dismissed the whole thing on the grounds of the fact he’s an alien, then maybe she would have been fine. But he had loved Rose, and he fell in love with Joan, so maybe, had things worked out, he could have loved her, too? But things didn’t work out, and it didn’t look like they were going to. So, Martha lied. She lied to herself, to him, to anyone who asked. Because maybe if she said she didn’t love him, if she swore it to herself, then she wouldn’t.


	9. broken

It started when she was little and she’d rubbed the nose off of her Wonder Woman action figure, that Martha Jones started collecting broken things. She’d find all the pieces to the shattered photo frame, pour them into a jar with the other broken things and let them sit. And then, one long, hot, boring day, she would pull them out and fix them in the most inventive way possible. She’d “doctor” them up. It lasted well into adulthood, this habit, but not even with physical things. She’d collect the shards of her broken family and paste them back together in a semi-recognizable way. A patient at the hospital would pass away and she would be the one to tell the family. 

And now - now, Martha was broken, too. She was going to have to find a way to pick up her pieces.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on tumblr @kirayukimuras


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